One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissancebegan with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).​​Bullard argues that Wyman and other members of Brooklyn’s business elite, inspired by William Roscoe, the "Lorenzo de' Medici of Liverpool," exemplify the ways in which “Atlantic commercial networks [facilitated] collaborative patronage of culture, and civic pride [that] flowed together around the arts.” She suggests that noblesse oblige as much as competition with Manhattan motivated Brooklyn’s “haut-bourgeois families” to employ their private wealth to sustain the arts as Brooklyn emerged as the third-largest independent city in the United States. Rather than proposing the creation of public institutions, Brooklyn’s elite employed the Medici merchant patronage model to found the city’s first reading rooms and musical, artistic, and horticultural societies to “serve as uplifting examples to their grubby and untutored urban neighbors.” Unfortunately, the Civil War disrupted Brooklyn’s Renaissance; and early success could not withstand the changes and divisions that the Gilded Age engendered. As a result, Brooklyn’s rapid but short-lived cultural renaissance remained lost to history — until Bullard followed Luther Wyman’s trail from rural Massachusetts to Brooklyn.

The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of RevolutionBy Mike RapportBasic Books (May 2017)​416 pg.

Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

In recent years, scholars have published numerous books on the Age of Revolutions and the connections between the countries involved; usually the United States, Great Britain, and France. These books have focused on people and ideas. But in The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution, Mike Rapport, a professor of modern European history at the University of Glasgow, takes a different approach, focusing instead on the geography of “the city” and how it may or may not have been more conducive to revolution. Venturing into the transatlantic history of revolution, he is concerned principally with the importance of place to success and failure. In particular, he is interested in how “spaces and buildings in these cities both symbolically and physically became places of conflict, how the cityscape itself became part of the experience of revolution and may even have helped shaped its course.” For Rapport, space itself has agency, which in this study has two meanings: a specific place, or the city itself. The Unruly City explores not only how New York City’s (and London’s and Paris’s) landscape propelled and hindered revolution, but also how people interacted with the urban geography.

​​Reviewed by Bruce Berg Over the last half century, every New York City mayor has been the subject of at least one, if not more, published works. There is clearly a consensus that mayors merit this level of attention and scrutiny, and book-length examinations of the city’s mayors have been both journalistic and academic. The current mayor, William (Bill) de Blasio is no exception to this treatment. Two works, one by New York Daily News journalist Juan González (Reclaiming Gotham) and the other by CUNY professor Joseph Viteritti (The Pragmatist), offer the preliminary narrative on the current mayor. What makes these manuscripts interesting is that both were written before the end of Mayor de Blasio’s first term. And while both offer the reader an examination of the political roots of Bill de Blasio and a discussion of his early accomplishments as mayor, five years from now readers will want to know more about the progress made over his two terms as mayor. Is there a reason why these authors should not have waited a little longer to publish their work? Possibly. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than five to one, Bill de Blasio is the first Democratic mayor elected in twenty years (five terms). Equally as important, de Blasio is only the second progressive Democratic mayor to be elected in recent years, with the support of minorities, municipal labor unions and progressive white voters; and the first of these mayors to be elected to a second term. And although Bill de Blasio was not a political unknown prior to being elected mayor, he clearly lacked the name recognition and the visibility of his two predecessors. So after twenty years of governance from the center of the political spectrum, the de Blasio mayoralty returned New York City to its liberal/progressive roots. As a result, New Yorkers want to know who this man is, what his origins are — ​political and otherwise — and how he might lead the city and its governing institutions. Mr. González and Professor Viteritti address these issues.

Women Will Vote: ​Winning Suffrage in New York StateBy Susan Goodier and Karen PastorelloCornell University Press (2017)

Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites who Fought for Women's Right to Vote By Johanna NeumanNew York University Press (2017)

Reviewed by Marcela Micucci

November 6th marked 100 years of women’s suffrage in New York. While celebrations of the landmark event have echoed across the state this past year, perhaps the greatest commemoration to the centennial year has been historians’ reignited interest in New York suffragists and their struggle to win the vote. Leading the charge in this cadre of works are Johanna Neuman’s Gilded Suffragists and Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello’s Women Will Vote.

​Neuman and Goodier and Pastorello both chronicle the suffrage movement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York, shedding a deft light on the various New York women seemingly overlooked in suffrage historiography. For Neuman, these women wielded distinguished names, like Astor, Rockefeller, Tiffany and Vanderbilt — the elite socialites and “gilded suffragists” that exploited their social status to bring suffrage into vogue. For Goodier and Pastorello, these women hailed from diverse regions, backgrounds and races — the rural, working-class, elite, and African-American women that organized for suffrage in their local towns and communities. And while both authors emphasize that few of these women formed a single suffrage coalition, their works exhume the stories of these less-studied women from the margins of history, illustrating their significant contributions to the fight for women’s suffrage in New York State.

In 1973, thirty-three-year-old Dawn Harris addressed the graduating class of Manhattan Community College as its valedictorian. In her speech, Harris thanked “the brothers and sisters at CCNY” who had shut down the flagship campus of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1969 to demand, among other things, immediate open enrollment across the entire system. She also thanked “those who tried to discourage me” because it spurred her “to make sure that they didn’t count over-thirty, underprepared women with children out.” “I think I did it,” she told her classmates. “I know we did.”

As a queer historian, a frustrating amount of my research comes from records of arrests. Sodomy, prostitution, disorderly conduct, masquerading, vagrancy, the crime against nature, solicitation – the list of laws that have been used in New York City to criminalize queer lives is long, varied, and stretches all the way back to 1634, when a Dutch colonial anti-sodomy law was used to prosecute a settler named Harmen van den Bogaert and an enslaved African man called Tobias.

I say frustrating because these arrests rarely say much to the historian interested in queer life: a name, a date, a charge; perhaps if you’re lucky you can find a newspaper squib that gives a line or two of context. Often, they are indicia in the truest sense, pointing towards something but not revealing much of anything (other than the existence of the state apparatus of criminalization). But in times where there was little public discussion of queer lives, records of arrests are some of the few regularly discoverable signposts pointing to where queerness may have existed.

In New York City, you’re always digging up someone or something that wasn’t supposed to be there. It comes with the territory.

Build a Federal Court complex at Foley Square and discover the African Burial Ground. Start digging for a parking garage at the National 9/11 Memorial site and find a 18th century Hudson River sloop double-parked. This year, a vacant lot slated for a preschool in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is said to be the final resting place of the “Maryland 400”— a battalion of Minutemen who held the line against the British as Washington’s troops barely escaped capture (if the “400” failed, the American rebellion would have ended there).

The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American HeroBy Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 2016)​384 pages

Reviewed by R. Bryan Willits​The story of Thomas Francis Meagher ­– Irish revolutionary, exile, American Civil War general, and eventual governor of the Montana Territory – has long deserved to be told. In his 44 years on earth, Meagher careened his way over several continents, transgressed national and epochal boundaries, and became well acquainted with many of the influential individuals of his time, in effect becoming one himself. Telling the complex story of this man, and the pivotal moments in which he was involved, is what Timothy Egan set out to do in this biography, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero. There is no doubt that researching and incorporating such a vast breadth of material into this story was a major challenge. Egan nevertheless produced a highly readable volume accessible to a general audience. While this book has already earned significant acclaim, it is not without flaws.

Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art By Judith E. Stein​Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 2016)384 pages

Reviewed by Marjorie Heins

Richard Bellamy was that strangest of New York City art dealers: he was totally uninterested in money. He was, however, in love with the challenging and avant-garde, and had an expert eye for the next big thing. In the late 1950s and early '60s, he discovered and championed such subsequent stars of pop art, minimalism, and large-scale sculptural abstraction as Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Donald Judd, and Lee Bontecou, generously referring them to more commercially savvy dealers when he knew that he couldn't represent them profitably. The art historian Judith Stein has given us a biography of this iconoclastic hero with, as its background, a panorama of the New York art scene in those critical years when new trends, including a return to figuration, displaced the Abstract Expressionist canon that had ruled the realm up through the mid-1950s.

​International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 TrainBy Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum Columbia University Press (April 2017)​312 pages

Reviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis

​This summer has been a hard one for the MTA. In early June, a nursing student on his way to graduation, dressed in his cap and gown, missed the ceremony due to train delays that made him three hours late. Sympathetic (and similarly delayed) fellow passengers threw him an impromptu graduation, with one person pulling up a picture of a diploma to present to him on a cell phone. Another played classic graduation jam “Good Riddance” by Green Day on a speaker, while the other passengers looked on, smiling.

​The following week, in an incident less heartwarming but more disturbing, an F train lost power while underground, trapping passengers for 45 minutes underground with no lights or air conditioning. With elderly and pregnant passengers forced to endure temperatures climbing above 100 degrees, and all the smells of a packed rush hour train, tensions and tempers flared. To add insult to injury, even as the train finally made it to the station, riders were forced to wait another ten minutes for the packed subway platform to clear before they were released, while onlookers took iPhone photos of their misery through the train’s steamed-up windows. At the end of the month, New York governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for the struggling MTA.